TGS 2003: Medal of Honor: Rising Sun Single-Player Impressions

Electronic Arts is showing off Medal of Honor: Rising Sun at its Tokyo Game Show booth, and we got to play a mission from the game's single-player campaign for the first time. Previous games in the Medal of Honor series have focused on the Allied invasion of Europe, but now EA is tackling the Pacific theater of operations with Rising Sun. We played the PS2 version, and from what we saw it's clear that the game has been firming up pretty well over the last few months of development.

The mission on display put us down in the jungle with two teammates, and initially we had to make our way through the foliage while fighting occasional skirmishes with Japanese soldiers who were hiding under cover. We were armed with a standard M1 rifle and a pistol, as well as a small supply of grenades. The Medal of Honor series has always been pretty cinematic in its presentation--you encounter a lot of scripted, movie-like events throughout the series' missions--and this became evident pretty quickly in Rising Sun when we ran into a friendly soldier who had been hiding out in the jungle. He told us that several of our compatriots were in a rather sticky situation, so we followed him to the outskirts of a small Japanese camp where several soldiers were being held and interrogated. We quickly opted to ambush the camp and save our allies, which resulted in a pretty heavy and dynamic firefight. After winning the battle and freeing the captives (two of which were killed in the fight), we learned of a Japanese gun emplacement on a hilltop that we needed to neutralize, but alas, we were killed in a dramatic uphill battle amongst a large patch of tall grass.

Medal of Honor: Rising Sun is coming together as a solid next entry in the series, and despite the change of venue, it's keeping all the essential elements intact. The pacing is pretty quick and the staged battle scenes are really quite intense. The graphics are improving as development progresses, too--the character models looked quite detailed, and the backgrounds, especially some of the foliage, were pretty convincing. All of the action ran at a smooth frame rate, too. We'll gather more intel on Medal of Honor: Rising Sun and report back to you before its November release.

See more of GameSpot's coverage of the 2003 Tokyo Game Show.